The present invention relates generally to an information network, and more particularly to a digital information exchange system where users can send and receive multiple types of data.
A multitude of electronic bulletin boards are in use today. Such bulletin boards generally consist of a particular type of data and are geared to a particular market. Generally, a subscriber has an interest in a particular subject, connects to a bulletin board corresponding to that subject, and retrieves information from it. Occasionally a subscriber may leave some information on a bulletin board, either for use by another subscriber or to an administrator of the board, but generally the flow of information is downstream, i.e., from the board to the subscriber.
Different commercial embodiments of electronic bulletin boards vary in the types of digital data used, however, they are similar in the general direction of the flow of data. For example, the Prodigy.RTM. and Compuserve.RTM. systems are very popular news and entertainment services. With the exception of their electronic mail, shopping facilities, and billing, the flow of information is towards the subscriber. Similarly, the Audio Archive in Syracuse, N.Y., provides hundreds of thousands of downloadable audio recordings to subscribers. The only information sent upstream by the subscriber is the choice of recording.
There are also a number of prior art patents disclosing such a downstream, unidirectional flow of data, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,132,992 to Yurt et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,326,289 to Dickinson, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,491,983 to Pinnow.
The above systems demonstrate a basic limitation of the traditional digital communications system, namely, the subscriber is limited to a particular library and is limited to a particular data type. There is a need for a system in which a vast number of participants can act as providers as well as consumers of data, in the manner of a commodities exchange. Such a system would give rise to a much larger number of producers of data than is presently available. This could ultimately provide a wider range of information topics available to information seekers and would provide more of an information marketplace.
It is also believed that it would be desirable and possible to provide data for almost any and every interest. In essence, it would be desirable to provide a multimedia system, in which all types of digital data (music, text, moving video, virtual reality, etc.) could be published and subsequently subscribed to by consumers using their information or entertainment system, and which could be expanded to adapt to the different data types thereby further expanding the digital information marketplace.